The Best Local Reading of 2010 (That I Attended)

Before saying farewell to 2010, it’s time to recognize the “Best Local Reading of the Year" or more    specifically, the “Best Local Reading of the Year That I Attended,” which does narrow the field considerably. My rating criteria are rather simple and subjective:

• Did I learn something that otherwise I would not have learned even if I read the book?
• Did the author and the audience seem to engage with each other?
• Did I come away with a little buzz (or buy the book) after the reading?

Some of this year’s candidates include well known authors such as Deborah Blum, Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Mullen, Nicky Hornby, and first timers Thomas Chatterton Williams and Grant Jerkins. When you think about it is not much of a list for a blog that “muses about book-related events, but what can I say? I try to get out to some literary event at least once a month.

This year’s Best Local Reading of 2010 That I Attended goes to the four poets who read from the University of Georgia Press anthology Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Arts, Sex and Everything Else during the Decatur Book Festival. The poets were: Kevin Young of Emory University, Georgia Poet Laureate David Bottoms, Georgia Tech’s Thomas Lux and Florida State’s David Kirby.  (Unfortunately Barbara Hamby who is the co-editor of the Seriously Funny along with Kirby could not attend because of the death of her mother.) For over an hour they entertained with humor, but the book’s offerings are not limited to just a few yucks, but the spectrum of the human condition. Each of the poets had a flair of performance (especially the theatrical Lux ) and I can still remember Kevin Young reading his own poem, “Ode to Pork,” (the first poem he wrote, Young said,  after the death of his father),  and Kirby reciting Jim Daniel’s poem, “Outdoor Chef”  about a high school barbecuing class. Having great material to work with always helps.

   On the lawn of the First Baptist Church,  Denise and I purchased a copy of the book before the Eagle Eye booksellers sold out. (But UGA press has `em). A few weeks later when we took a road trip to Tybee Island we played “audio book” and read passages from it to each other. The book works well that way, which is no surprise. In the introduction of the book the editors mentioned that in the two years it took to make their selections, Kirby and Hamby (they are married) would set out in their battered compact car, with a couple of boxes of poetry books in the back, and read aloud to each other as a way to select poems for this anthology.

That sounds a labor of love for them (but still a labor), but fortunately for us, we get it all in one book.

Previous Winners

Admittedly, I forgot to award a 2009 winner, but that should have gone to the late E. Lynn Harris for his reading at the Decatur Public Library in February, 2009. You can read about that experience here.  The 2008 winner was The New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr for his one of a kind  “scratch-n-sniff” reading.

Comments

[William Gwin]

Thanks for sharing, Murray.